On Sunday, Telfar, the rebellious anti-fashion-with-a-capital-F brand, held a news conference to announce its latest project, Telfar TV.
The 24-hour live TV station will be accessible via an app on smart TVs. The channel won’t be on YouTube or Instagram, the company said; there will be no way to share its programming or leave comments.
It’s not yet clear what that programming may be or when it will air, though that seems to be the point: Telfar TV is a “void,” and a “vessel” for expression by the designer Telfar Clemens and his community.
But here’s where fans of Telfar’s enormously popular shopping bags, the typically sold-out Bushwick Birkin, should pay close attention: Watching Telfar TV may be the best way to score a bag. Mr. Clemens is tired of bots — tired of the robots or people or robot-people who snap up his bags only to resell them for 10 times their original price.
He is “here to take back every bag that the bot has stolen from us and give it right back to everybody in this room,” Mr. Clemens said.
At unannounced intervals the TV station will air a QR code allowing viewers to shop the latest bag drop. The drop won’t be announced anywhere else. “We can drop exactly as many bags as people are watching,” said Babak Radboy, the creative director of Telfar.
This will be tested with a new bag shape: the duffel, a buttery leather cylinder with long and short straps, imprinted with the brand’s “T” logo on its sides. Like the original Telfar shopping bag, it comes in small, medium and large sizes.
“Wait, who wants one?” Mr. Clemens asked at the news conference, after rolling out black and white versions of the bags on a pedestal and unveiling them like a game show prize, eliciting cheers and grabby hands thrust in the air. “You gotta check out TC TV.”
